Art Pulse will shut down

Nine-year-old San Diego non-profit arts service organization out of money

The good news for Art Pulse: the organization recently won a regional Emmy for an ArtPulse TV episode.

The bad news for Art Pulse: there’s no more money.

“We’re calling it quits,” said Art Pulse’s co-founder, April Game, on Monday. “We’ll have a board meeting later this week and we’re going to close.”

For most of its nine-year existence, Art Pulse co-founder Henry Moon has been funding the organization, which for the past year has been based at Bread & Salt in Logan Heights. The nonprofit organization operates a gallery, a website and offers education programs for artists. According to Game, it has an annual budget between $700,000 and $900,000.

But Moon had to drastically cut back his support earlier this year, and in an email blast in April, Art Pulse, calling itself “your local arts agency,” asked people to “fund what you believe in. Make a gift to Art Pulse today.”

Apparently, not enough people believed, and Game said the financial situation has reached a point where she has no choice but to shut down.

“I’m disappointed, but it’s what we have to do,” Game said.

Game and Art Pulse have been virtually inseparable.

She arrived in San Diego in 2005 from Los Angeles, where she ran an art gallery. She formed the San Diego Fine Arts Society in 2007, moved it to NTC in 2009, renamed it Art Pulse in 2011 and raised a few eyebrows the same year by becoming one of the major sponsors of the Americans for the Arts annual convention in San Diego in 2011.

But Game has always thought big.

She hosted a series of community forums that brought arts administrators from all over California to San Diego County to support the idea of a county arts council, which Game hoped, would be Art Pulse.

Given the realities of county politics, and the presence of a strong city arts commission, that idea seemed like a non-starter. But in 2012, Game and Art Pulse made a $7 million bid to buy Pacific View Elementary in Encinitas and transform it into a community arts center. It looked like there was a deal, but ultimately it fell through.

She started a TV show, ArtPulse TV, which San Diego’s NBC 7 aired through last December, and an online listing service, Snorkl, which was still live as of Tuesday.

Earlier this year, Game relaunched Culture Buzz, an online arts journal that included several former Union-Tribune and CityBeat writers.

“Art Pulse is committed to promoting and expanding arts journalism and supporting artists of a different genre — writers — in earning a real wage doing what they do best,” stated a news release from Art Pulse.

But some of those writers, apparently, have not been paid.

“I feel terrible about that,” said Game, who added she will be working for the next two months to try to find money to pay the employees. She hopes to have everything wrapped up by the end of August.

Game said she has several options for her future, including working as a consultant on an arts project in Europe. She indicated she’s unlikely to stay in San Diego after closing Art Pulse.